Chicago History | Summer 2014

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C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Senior Editor Emily H. Nordstrom Assistant Editor Esther D. Wang Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography Joseph Aaron Campbell Stephen Jensen On the cover: Boats on the Lincoln Park Lagoon, Chicago, Illinois, 1890. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-03420

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Summer 2014 VOLUME XXXIX, NUMBER 2

Contents

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The Wedding of Land and Lake Carl Smith

The Jackson Park Caravels Joseph M. Di Cola

White Sox World Travelers Richard C. Lindberg

Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

The Wedding of Land and Lake Chicago’s rich natural resources made it a desirable destination for settlers, but it was the young city’s astute management of water that transformed it into America’s great inland metropolis.

CARL SMITH

C

ities are by definition built environproduced commodity whose source was a ments where humans have mechanical faucet. They gave little altered the natural world to thought to the pumps and pipes that suit their needs. Waterworks are pardelivered it, and even less to its ticularly powerful expressions of natural source. Most commenthe human desire and ability to taries on new urban water systems overcome, discipline, and even envisioned the commodification of dominate nature. As famed archiwater in very positive terms, often tect and engineer Benjamin asserting that the appropriation Latrobe, who designed Philaof this natural resource was delphia’s pioneering 1801 nature’s intention, however works, explained, a system not paradoxical this might seem. only must move enormous They viewed waterworks and the amounts of water from its source Engraving of the Chicago Water Works buildings cities they served as realizations of to users, but in doing so it also “at the foot of Chicago Avenue,” c. 1857 God’s plan for the natural creation. “must not be liable to interruption Even as city people gloried in subfrom ice or freshe[t]s, but be equally useful in the jecting nature to their will, however, they revealed an severest winter, and in the wettest summer.” His steam often strained and sometimes almost desperate eagerness engines would keep the Centre Square holding tanks to maintain, observe, and honor a vital connection to the “perpetually full, being of a power sufficient to supply natural world as something separate from and above the every possible demand of the city.” They would in effect one that humans made. . . . liberate the people they served from nature, since their By this logic, the powerful flow of ambitious and taloperation “depend[ed] not on the variable seasons, nor ented newcomers to Boston was as natural and in on the natural advantages of situation,—but solely on keeping with God’s wishes as was building the aqueduct the option of man.” Philadelphia would soon build a that carried the water from Long Pond to the city. This dam that diverted the Schuylkill River, while Boston conidea was most eloquently expressed by physician and structed one that increased the capacity of Long Pond, man of letters Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes when he which its engineers also fitted with a gatehouse that regobserved that Boston “drains a large water-shed of its ulated the flow of the pond’s water into the aqueduct—a intellect, and will not itself be drained.” At the 1846 fabricated river—they erected. Chicago would dig a twogroundbreaking, Mayor Quincy cited the “magnificent mile tunnel through the clay bottom of Lake Michigan. stores” and the “dwellings, which might almost be called Once a new waterworks system was in place, city palaces,” that had been constructed by many a country people quickly adjusted to the displacement and reconboy who “entered the city with only a quarter of a dollar figuration of nature. They now treated water as a humanin his pocket and all his wardrobe in the knapsack on his 4 | Chicago History | Summer 2014

Above: Children play at the Eli Bates Fountain in Lincoln Park, August 1915. Below: Chicagoans enjoy a leisurely day of boating at the Lincoln Park Lagoon, 1890.

City Water | 5

back.” Such country boys would continue to arrive, Quincy confidently predicted, thanks to the fact that Boston would now have enough water to attract an even larger population of ambitious individuals.

Lemuel Shattuck and fellow statistician Dr. Jesse Chickering, who also surveyed the population of antebellum Boston, verified Holmes’s assertion. Shattuck observed that “a large majority of the active businessmen of Boston” were “men who have come to this metropolis to seek their fortunes, bringing with them the economical habits, the industry, the energy, and the perseverance, which are peculiar to the people of interior towns of

New England.” But Chickering’s assessment contained a warning about this trend. He might have been talking about the new water supply when he asserted that it was essential to the well-being of Boston that the city never exhaust the supply of such newcomers. Only the steady arrival of people from smaller settlements and rural areas could enable it to thrive. Chickering directly compared this human flow to water. “The stream continues flowing on to supply the waste,” he wrote, “and by the abundance of the flow, a multitude of the adventurers remain to do the labor, to fill up the places, and to give a direction to the affairs of the heterogeneous community.”

A woman takes a sip from a public water fountain on State Street, c. 1915.

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Workmen close Buckingham Fountain for the season, photograph for the Chicago Herald and Examiner, October 1930.

While the allusion to “waste” implied that there was a downside to the “flow” for some people, Chickering found another trend more disturbing. His data told him that those people he regarded as descended from the best New England stock were lately moving not into Boston but out to western states, and to younger cities like Chicago, taking with them “the hardy enterprise, the industrious habits, the intelligence and the institutions to be found in those parts of the country they have left, and transplanted them in the new states which they have adopted for their future homes.” If these other less developed places appeared more promising to such people, Boston’s intellectual and economic vitality would go into decline.

Chicago boosters happily agreed with Chickering, staking their own claims to nature as an ally. They relentlessly bragged of their city’s natural assets and ignored what limitations could not be denied—or denied them anyway. In their eyes, nature had ensured that Chicago’s success was a foregone conclusion. In 1846, two years before the Illinois and Michigan Canal was completed,

lawyer and local historian Henry Brown told the Chicago Lyceum, “Canal or no Canal, Chicago will advance.”

Only a great calamity or the “consummate folly, depravity or impudence of her people” could slow the city’s majestic ascent. This was because Chicago’s location made it an unstoppable economic force. “So long as yonder inland seas [i.e., the Great Lakes] bear on their surface the wealth of every clime,” he intoned, “so long as yonder prairies bloom with verdure, and the ‘cattle upon the thousand hills’ shall graze their herbage, and so long as yonder interminable fields shall wave with their golden harvest, an effort to blot Chicago from existence, or to depress her rising consequence, would be like an attempt to quench the stars.” Chicago’s “position is commanding and her progress sure.”

Real-estate promoter John Stephen Wright, who was second to none in heralding Chicago’s prospects, gloated in agreement when he cited a Cincinnati paper’s concern that “trade and travel naturally flow east and west on lines of communication” to Chicago. He similarly quoted City Water | 7

Above: John Stephen Wright, oil painting by Susan Hely St. John, c. 1870. Below: An engraving of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, c. 1859.

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a St. Louis paper that sadly admitted that “the tide of commerce of the Grand River Valley of Missouri is now tending towards Chicago, and that St. Louis is fast losing the trade of its own State.” Wright announced that the “Hub” of “our National Wheel of Commerce” was unquestionably his city, which was, he said—employing the familiar dichotomy—“pivoted by Nature and by Art.” Wright agreed with those who held that natural advantages only mattered if people knew what to do with them. “Nature” had “laid from the Atlantic Ocean into the heart of the Continent, this chain of rivers and lakes, over a thousand miles of the grandest navigation on the globe,” and “Art” had “perfected” nature’s work with canals and railways. Building a place as magnificent as Chicago required generous helpings of both. “Nature never makes a city,” Wright asserted. “No human institution is more artificial, success depending upon a conjunction of causes, which, however liberally bestowed by nature, lie dormant until operated by human effort and ingenuity.” Without this natural endowment, in turn, human effort would face a mighty challenge. If a city did prosper, as Chicago was doing, this proved that nature was its ally. “Art,” he explained, “would have a difficult task in localities neglected of nature, and easy upon sites she favored.” His city’s unequaled pace of growth “would therefore be strong prima facie evidence that nature favored Chicago.”

Completed in 1848, the Illinois and Michigan Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. Above: A Chicago-area canal lock, 1912.

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These Jevne and Almini lithographs depict Chicago in the mid1860s, a time when boosters were promoting the city as “God and nature’s chosen place.” Left: Court House Square, c. 1866. Above: Crosby’s Opera House, c. 1865.

“As in every natural object which astonishes us for its beauty, its ingenuity, its perfect adaptation to its purpose,” Wright explained, “it is more unreasonable to suppose it the creation of accident, than of an intelligent Creator; so in this union of many free and independent wills, effecting these great purposes as with one mind, one soul, an over-ruling Power must govern.” Making use of what nature had provided was a matter of sacred duty.

“We cannot examine into the why and wherefore of our growth,” he wrote, “without becoming reverently impressed with the truth that this is not man’s work alone.” Wright here integrated a belief in technological progress into the period’s powerful current of post-millennial thinking. City building was a form of perfectionism, and Chicago above all other places was God and nature’s chosen place.

No wonder, then, the excitement when Chicago seemed to prove this by bringing the cool, crystal waters of Lake Michigan to its people. At the ceremonial placement of the last stone in the lake tunnel, Mayor John B. Rice congratulated Chicagoans “that they have the pure refreshing water of our mighty lake,” which, along with the prairie winds and fertile fields, “tend to make Chicago the most favored of cities.” Rice finished with a tribute to the wisdom and will with which his city developed the features that made it so “favored.”

City Water | 11

“Hail! Chicago, metropolis of the great West,” he exclaimed, describing the city as a community that was “vast in her resources, fortunate in her citizens, whose genius, industry and integrity secure to us the use of all those advantages and blessings which are vouchsafed to us by the Creator and Dispenser of all the things which we have.”

A reporter for the Chicago Republican who covered the completion of the tunnel (which a headline writer described as “The Wedding of the Lake and the Land”) wrote that “more truly than ever before, is Chicago entitled to 12 | Chicago History | Summer 2014

Above: A crowd gathers at the cornerstone laying of the Chicago Water Tower, March 25, 1867.

Left: The following day, this article appeared in the Chicago Republican.

her name of the Garden City. For water is the condition of the Garden.” His use of the capital G signaled that this was not just any garden. “In the description of Eden,” he explained, “half of the space is taken up by a statement of the circling streams that irrigated its meads and diffused everywhere their grateful coolness.” Chicago was not quite the second coming of paradise, but thanks to the water the tunnel supplied from the unsullied reaches of Lake Michigan, it was ready to take its

Above: An undated portrait of Mayor John B. Rice. Below: Chicago’s Two-Mile Crib in Lake Michigan in 1866, the year after it opened. Lithograph by Jevne and Almini.

place as a center of a great productive harmony between humans and their Creator. . . .

But Nature was not nearly as willing a partner in human affairs as others would like to believe. As cities piled levels of built environment every which way upon each other, nature frequently refused to cooperate in its own submission. In Philadelphia, freshets swamped buildings along the rivers, and the construction of dams drove fish away. Chicagoans had something of the opposite problem when fish swam out of their water faucets, gifting them with more natural bounty than they wanted.

One of the first Americans to realize in its full profundity that altering nature invited unintended and unwanted consequences was attorney, editor, farmer, mill owner, politician, linguist, and diplomat (he was the American minister to Turkey and then, for over twenty years, to Italy) George Perkins Marsh. This extraordinary polymath is credited, among other things, with being America’s first major ecological thinker. Marsh’s Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, published in 1864, was the product of decades of wide travel, close observation, and deep reflection.

Marsh concluded that “the destructive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he

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Published in 1869, the Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Public Works to the Common Council of the City of Chicago featured elevations of a well curb and dredging machine (opposite) and a water crib and tunnel (above).

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Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, carte de visite by the Wallis Brothers, 1870

advances in civilization, until the impoverishment, with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of the soil is threatening him, at last awakens him to the necessity of preserving what is left, if not of restoring what has been wantonly wasted.” He decried “the prodigality and the thriftlessness [that] former generations have imposed upon their successors.” The deliberate changes humans inflicted on nature were bad enough, but these were “insignificant in comparison with the contingent and unsought results which have flowed from them.” . . .

The environmental damage brought by rapid urbanization in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago confirmed Marsh’s warnings. . . . Chicago waterworks designer and city engineer Ellis S. Chesbrough and two other experts hired by Boston in the 1870s to evaluate its sewers reported that much of the city’s large stretches of land that had been created by dumping earth from elsewhere into marshy areas were “filled with material more or less unsuited to the purpose, and the evils of such a condition have been increased from the periodical floodings with water or sewage to which these places have been subject.”

Perhaps Chesbrough had learned something from having allowed the sewers he built in Chicago starting in the 1850s to disgorge into the river and the lake. To be fair, even at the time, Chesbrough knew this was a flawed choice and expressed some of the same concerns as Marsh. Chesbrough’s fellow Chicagoan and public health champion Dr. John H. Rauch regretted that those who 16 | Chicago History | Summer 2014

founded cities, including his own, paid too little attention to the basic question of whether the natural setting they selected was suitable as a place to live. They cared too much for “trade and barter,” as opposed to “healthfulness of surroundings,” with the result that they later had to confront “deficiencies in regard to water supply, to soil, to atmosphere, to location and topography.”

One very popular mode of questioning the human transformation of nature by building cities had little to do with such serious philosophical, scientific, environmental, and sanitary objections. In this case, city people did not criticize city life for all the damage it had done but instead expressed a longing for a simpler and better time when they lived closer to nature. It would have been more remarkable had they not done so, since pastoral nostalgia is timeless. But the quickening pace of industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century intensified reflections on what had been lost amid all the changes. The period that witnessed the advent of city water, with all its accompanying alterations of the natural landscape, prompted in some city people a yearning to return, at least imaginatively, to the countryside that they had left behind. To a notable degree, this return directly involved water.

This was especially true in the United States, which many claimed enjoyed a special relationship with nature, and whose burgeoning cities were heavily populated by native- and foreign-born newcomers with a rural background. While a multitude of countr y people from America and Europe chose to cast their lot in urban places, the strong presence of nostalgia in the literary record suggests that many felt at least twinges of regret. To a significant degree, however, this was a form of psychological accommodation, not resistance. Taking an imaginative refuge in the past, away from the routines and pressures of city life, was quite different from being willing to go back, even if that were possible.

Often the site of nostalgic retreat was quite specifically a watery one. . . . That such a retreat might exist just a few miles away was not enough, however. Believing that palpable and positive affective contact with the natural was essential to a healthy human spirit, city people took significant steps to reserve a place for nature in their midst, even if they had to fabricate it themselves. They did so by constructing “natural” retreats of various kinds, in which water was often an important presence. . . .

Other cities followed Philadelphia in making the sites of their waterworks into places where city dwellers could recreate amidst a reconstructed nature. A descriptive guide to the Boston’s waterworks system published the year it opened recommended a visit to the reservoir in Brookline, which its author described as an “artificial lake.” “The prospect in the summer season is one of the most agree-

able,” the guide stated. The thirty-acre body of water, tidily trimmed with a stone embankment and a walking path along its mile-long perimeter, was (and remains) a pleasant suburban setting. Like the members of Philadelphia’s Watering Committee, Chicago officials wished to treat their city’s waterworks as a civic space where nature was welcome. In 1857 Superintendent Benjamin F. Walker asked the commissioners for a “reasonable amount” to upgrade the site at Chicago Avenue. He proposed to devote this money to grading and fencing, as well as to placing shade trees in the sandy soil near the lake, where few such trees grew of their own natural accord. A decade later the Chicago Tribune noted that the replacement of the 1850s system with the tunnel-fed Pumping Station and Water Tower would provide an opportunity to construct a lovely park that would surround the works and greatly improve the area. “Handsome trees and fountains will be planted and located in this park, which, it is earnestly to be hoped, will be ‘a thing of beauty’ and ‘a joy forever,’ ” the paper said, quoting British Romantic poet John Keats’s “Endymion.”

Dr. John H. Rauch wrote extensively about the need for “healthfulness of surroundings,” including reports about Chicago’s public parks in 1869 (left) and the state’s water supplies in 1889 (right). Top: An undated portrait of Dr. Rauch taken in Springfield, Illinois.

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The Chicago Avenue Water Tower and Pumping Station, a noted landmark since its construction, is pictured above in the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and at left surrounded by parkland in 1891.

Residents and visitors responded positively to this integration of heroic technology and carefully constructed natural charm, especially in Philadelphia.

Westcott’s history recalled the appeal of Centre Square, with its engine house, landscaping, and water nymph.

“The entire affair being unique,” he wrote, “[it] was considered a great novelty, and one of the sights of the city which thousands flocked to see.” The Fairmount works became an even more popular “natural” attraction.

Boston-based Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion reported in 1851, “A ride to Fairmount, and a walk across the wire bridge [Charles Ellet’s suspension bridge, completed in 1841], is the daily recreation of many citizens during the heats of summer, and is at once a convenient and economical pastime, inasmuch as some forty or fifty omnibuses are constantly plying to and fro.” Philadelphia educator, philanthropist, and local historian James Hosmer Penniman remembered firsthand the pleasure people took in the ensemble of buildings and landscaping along the river. “Philadelphians were more proud of the water works than of Independence Hall,” he wrote. “They said one might as well visit London without viewing Westminster Abbey as come to Philadelphia and not see the water works. . . .”

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Chicago’s waterworks on Chicago Avenue was not surrounded by nearly as large or as gracefully fashioned a park as the Fairmount grounds, but it still was nicely landscaped. It was the lake tunnel, however, that proved to be “an object of great fascination to the people of Chicago and to visitors from other cities.” A voyage by tug to the crib at the tunnel’s eastern end was described as “an indispensability,” comparable to “the study of music among young ladies, or a journey to Mecca among the Moslems.” Visitors “whose good opinions are worth cultivating” (i.e., journalists, business leaders, and dignitaries from other cities whom Chicagoans were always so eager to impress) were “of course expected to see the lion, or the leviathan of the deep.”

General Ulysses S. Grant and his staff, fresh from victory in the Civil War, toured the tunnel in July 1865, when the “lion” was still under construction. So did “some of the prominent men of Boston,” who were on a “tour of investigation from the ‘hub,’ to what was but a few years ago, on the rim of the universe of civilization.”

The Bostonians were accompanied by a “goodly company of Aldermen and other officials of our own city,” wrote a reporter, “and a few men prominent in other than the governing walks of life,” keen to show off this achievement that attested to the rise of Chicago to its self-proclaimed status as America’s great inland metropolis.

“When one is enabled,” as these distinguished tourists were, “to witness the gigantic preparations, the mighty forces employed, the huge machinery brought to bear, for the effecting of the desired ends” of the collective enterprise of Chicago, “a due appreciation of its importance is felt, more than in any other way could be gained.”

Waterworks were not the only place in the cityscape that featured artificial constructions intended to retain or restore the presence of nature in urban life. So-called public gardens, which were in fact privately owned and charged admission, were sophisticated urban oases where one could take refreshment amidst arrangements of plantings. Related initiatives, like the incorporation of the Boston Public Garden in 1838 by a group of wealthy benefactors, combined qualities of both the public gardens (including paid admission) and of the horticultural societies being organized in American cities. Located on a muddy stretch of land between the Common and the yet-unfilled Back Bay, the Public Garden was the site in its early years of a building that had been turned into a conservatory housing tropical plants and exotic birds, a very different nature from the one native to the region.

The creation of large and truly public parks in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, established by the community and open to all, was explicitly intended to protect against urbanization’s further destruction of nature and to compensate for the damage done already.

In this same period, so-called garden cemeteries not only 20 | Chicago History | Summer 2014

The Carter H. Harrison Water Intake Crib remained fully operational until 1997. A Chicago Daily News photographer captured the crib’s exterior (top) and well room (bottom) in 1910. Center: Mayor Harrison and unidentified men inspect the crib on July 10, 1903.

A water intake crib by the shore of Lake Michigan covered with ice from a storm in 1929.

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When Graceland Cemetery opened in 1860, it sat two miles north of the city’s northern border (today, one can find it at the corner of Clark Street and Irving Park Road). Above: The cemetery’s office and railway station, c. 1883. Below: Its park-like landscape provided “a consolatory escape.”

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This 1873 map shows the area and boundaries of Chicago’s Lincoln Park.

provided places to bury the dead but also promised a consolatory escape, or at least the illusion of escape, from the quotidian world, which was literally walled out.

These burial grounds, sometimes called rural cemeteries, were located beyond city limits, as local health ordinances increasingly prescribed. The first was Mount Auburn on the western edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It was established in 1831, to be followed five years later

by Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill, where Frederick Graff is buried. In 1860, when Graceland Cemetery officially opened two miles beyond Chicago’s northern border, then at Fullerton Avenue, residents filled the special Chicago and Milwaukee Railway excursion trains that conveyed people to the event. In these serene sanctuaries, city dwellers could (and still can) meditate on nature, including the great natural fact of mortality, which no artifice can defeat.

All these “natural” settings were sure to include water as an essential design component, in the form of pools, ponds, and rivulets. Their planners resembled the artist that Melville’s Ishmael describes, who desired to paint “the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco,” only to realize that no matter what the charm of the other elements he might include, “all were vain,” unless the eye of the human figure in the painting “were fixed upon the magic stream before him.” The Frog Pond, the focus of the 1848 water celebration, was originally a naturally occurring body of water, but the first Mayor Quincy’s administration placed a decidedly artificial stone curb around it as part of the continuing process of turning the Common, once mainly used as a shared grazing area,

into an elegant urban park. In the early years of Lincoln Park, which consists substantially of filled land, the Chicago Board of Public Works created the entirely human-made lake that is now called the South Pond.

Reprinted with permission from City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago by Carl Smith, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2013 by Carl Smith. All rights reserved.

Carl Smith is the Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English and American Studies and professor of history at Northwestern University. His prize-wining volumes include Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman and The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. He is also the curator, in collaboration with the Chicago History Museum and Academic Research & Technologies at Northwestern University, of two online web exhibitions: the Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory (greatchicagofire.org) and the Dramas of Haymarket (chicagohistory.org/dramas/).

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 4, detail of i68399; 5, top: i20514, bottom: i03420; 6, i05611; 7, i24087; 8, top: i64467, bottom: i05843; 9, DN-0059411; 10–11, i62080; 11, i62079; 12, top: i64424, bottom: clipping from the Chicago Republican, March 26, 1867; 13, top: i03272, bottom: i63093; 14, i68398; 15, i05871; 16, i09793; 17, top: i52307, bottom, left: i59354, right: i68609; 18–19, i05902; 19, i02792; 20, from top: DN-0056403, DN-0000802, DN-0056075; 21, DN0090257; 22, top: i51408, bottom: i61404; 23, i67225.

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THE

JACKSON PARK ! CARAVELS " JOSEPH M. DI COLA

T

o celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, a fair was proposed, and at the end of the 1880s, four cities expressed interest in hosting it: Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Washington, DC. Although Chicago and New York proved the frontrunners, the United States Congress eventually voted in favor of Chicago. This was a coup for the city, coming as it did a little over two decades after the devastating 1871 fire.

The World’s Columbian Exposition opened on May 1, 1893.

President Grover Cleveland was on hand for the event and, after a speech, pressed the button that turned on the lights and machinery. Despite the financial panic of 1893, which brought one of the worst depressions in American history, 28 million visitors attended the fair. They came to explore the vast fairgrounds—633 acres of grand buildings, pavilions, exhibits, attractions, and parkland, all tied together by waterways. The thousands of displays included replicas of the three ships from Columbus’s first voyage—the Santa Maria, Niña, and Pinta. The caravels delighted fairgoers and later developed a storied history of their own.

Left: The replicas of Columbus’s first fleet arrive in Chicago on July 7, 1893. Photograph by Franklin S. Catlin. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-61765

Above: This commemorative metal pin, shaped like a ship at sea, bears a likeness of Christopher Columbus and the inscription, “1492 World’s Fair 1892— Official Souvenir.” Chicago History Museum, ICHi-66887

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1892–93

Intended as a gift of Spain to be displayed at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the replica of the Santa Maria was constructed at La Carraca Arsenal, a naval shipyard in San Fernando, under the direction of a Spanish Commission chaired by Cesáreo Fernández Duro. During the fifteenth century, ships were generally purposebuilt with tradition, rather than drawings or plans, serving as the guide to construction; therefore, the only resource available concerning the design, dimensions, rigging and sails, and other features of the ships from Columbus’s first voyage is his logbook.

The original logbook is lost, and the only extant copy is a transcription made by Father Bartolomé de las Casas in the mid-sixteenth century. Any attempts at reconstruction, therefore, must be inferred from the incomplete data provided by las Casas. From this information, scholars have deduced that the Santa Maria was a carrack, or nau for ship in Portuguese, a sturdy cargo ship designed to sit high in the water and travel long distances.

The Pinta and Niña were caravels, broad-beamed vessels usually with three masts rigged with either lateen (triangular) or both square and lateen sails. The Niña was the former, a caravela latina, and the Pinta, the latter, a caravela redonda.

When the ships reached the Canary Islands, however, evidence suggests that the crew rerigged the Niña with square sails to match the Pinta and Lined up in stately fashion at the fair, the reproductions of Columbus’s enable faster travel while crossing three ships delighted visitors. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-52269 the Atlantic.

The reconstructed Santa Maria launched on June 26, 1892. That same year, the United States government placed orders for replicas of the Pinta and the Niña. Due to budget constraints, hulls of two existing boats were used in those reconstructions, resulting in ungainly, disproportionate, and unseaworthy designs. Because of this, the Santa Maria sailed across the Atlantic, while the Niña and Pinta were towed. The facsimile of the Niña was rigged with lateen sails (unlike the original which had been rerigged); the reconstructed Pinta was rigged incorrectly and given a forecastle, a feature not believed to have been part of the original vessel.

En route to the United States, the ships stopped at Tenerife in the Canaries, San Juan, and Havana. Upon reaching the east coast, they docked in Hampton Roads, Virginia, for an unexpected appearance at an international Naval Review, and in New York City, where the Santa Maria participated in

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the Columbian Naval Review. The ships then sailed up the St. Lawrence River with stops in Quebec City, Montreal, and Toronto. After a final stop in Milwaukee, they arrived in Chicago on July 7, 1893, 147 days after leaving Spain and more than two months after the opening of the fair.

Fair organizers moored the vessels in the South Inlet at the east end of the Agricultural Building. On occasion, the crew sailed the caravels out into Lake Michigan before returning them to their mooring places. Photographs from the fair suggest that the ships were a popular attraction. One of the Santa Maria shows her decks crowded with visitors; another shows long lines of people waiting to board the Niña and Pinta.

William Henry Jackson captured this view of the World’s Columbian Exposition as seen from Lake Michigan.

Chicago History Museum, ICHi-17124

This map of the fairgrounds, produced by Rand, McNally & Co., includes the mooring locations of the Santa Maria, Niña, and Pinta in the South Inlet. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-30461

Jackson Park Caravels | 27

Fairgoers were permitted to board and explore the replicas. Above, they crowd the deck of the Santa Maria. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-14880

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Left: This view from the deck of the Santa Maria captures the back of the boat. Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi-7393

Held on October 9, 1893, Chicago Day commemorated the twenty-second anniversary of the Great Fire.

Above: View of the Administration Building surrounded by crowds on Chicago Day. Below: A ticket to the festivities. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-02201 and ICHi-28739

Jackson Park Caravels | 29

Augustus Saint-Gaudens created this statue of Christopher Columbus setting foot on land. At the World’s Columbian Exposition, it stood in front of the Administration Building. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-25144

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! THE FATE OF "

L

COLUMBUS’S FIRST FLEET

ate in the evening of December 24, 1492, the Santa Maria and Niña were sailing off the north coast of La Isla Española (later shortened to Hispaniola). On board the flagship, the Santa Maria, the watch changed at 11:00 P.M. The men grumbled at being turned out for duty, since they had slept little for the previous two nights. The sea was calm; the wind was light; the progress slow. The only sounds were of the swells breaking on the reefs that lay nearby. A feeling of complacency was in the air, and the men relaxed their vigilance.

Admiral Christopher Columbus and the new officer of the watch spoke for a moment, and then the former went to his cabin for a much-needed rest. Almost immediately the crew, shirking their duties, found places on the open deck and settled in for a nap. The officer of the watch noticed nothing unusual in the wind or in the course of the ship and retired. The weary helmsman turned the watch over to an inexperienced boy and found a place to sleep. As the date turned to Christmas Day, the Santa Maria slid onto a reef, and before long, the surf had moved her so far in that subsequent swells lifted and dropped the ship onto the coral, puncturing holes in the bottom.

In his log entry for Tuesday, December 25, 1492, Columbus noted: I decided to lie down to sleep because I had not slept for two days and one night. Since it was calm, the sailor who was steering the ship also decided to catch a few winks and then left the steering to a young ship’s boy, a thing which I have always expressly prohibited throughout the voyage. It made no difference whether there was a wind or calm; the ships were not to be steered by young boys.

Columbus ordered the crew to remove the mainmast and take other measures to lighten the ship in order to refloat her, but to no avail. As waves continued to hit the

ship, the hull began to fill with water. As daybreak came and provided the necessary light by which to work, the crew salvaged the ship’s stores, cargo, and any equipment that could be of use, including the timbers, planks, and fastenings “with which to construct [a] fortress.” By January 2, little was left of the Santa Maria but the lower hull. Thus it was that one of the best-known ships in history died an ignoble death.

The fate of the Pinta is unknown. After her return from Columbus’s first voyage on March 15, 1493, she disappears from the historical record. The history of the Niña is another matter. The Santa Maria may be the best-known of the three vessels from the expedition, but the Niña appears to have been the best “sailor.” In a journal entry dated Tuesday, February 12, 1493, during his homeward voyage, Columbus wrote of the Niña: “At this time I began to experience heavy seas and stormy weather. If the caravel had not been very sound and well equipped, I fear we should have been lost.”

The Niña was one of seventeen vessels sent on the second voyage in 1493 and Columbus’s flagship for his return to Spain in 1496. She then sailed with a cargo of wine to Italy, where she was captured by pirates off the coast of Sardinia but subsequently recovered. The Niña was part of the fleet for Columbus’s third voyage in 1498 and, the last we know of her, made a voyage to the Pearl Coast of South America in 1501.

In 1893, the Detroit Publishing Company commissioned photographs of the replicas of Columbus’s first fleet.

Attributed to Edward H. Hart, the fifteen remaining images include these individual portraits of the Santa Maria (left), Pinta (top), and Niña (above). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company collection, LC-D42117, LC-D4-5516, and LC-D4-5514

Jackson Park Caravels | 31

1894–1919

After being open for six months, the World’s Columbian Exposition closed on October 31, 1893. Three fires in 1894—the first on January 8, the second during the last week in February, and the third on July 5—destroyed many of the structures, and by October 1896, a salvage company had removed all but a few reminders of the grand exposition. The Santa Maria, Pinta, and Niña were not affected, however, and continued to be part of the Jackson Park landscape for many years.

Chicagoans and visitors, alike, still came to see and take on-board tours of the ships, but it seems that the South Park Commission, which had charge of the vessels after 1900, did little to maintain them.

In 1911, a pageant was organized to celebrate Columbus Day and the 419th anniversary of Columbus’s first landfall. The reenactment opened in Jackson Park, representing Palos, Spain, at the replica of the Franciscan monastery La Rabida. Columbus had spent time and sought counsel at the monastery before his 1492 voyage, and workers had reconstructed it in Chicago to house Columbian artifacts at the 1893 fair. During the festivities in 1911, Father Perez welcomed Columbus; King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella commissioned him to undertake the voyage; and Columbus and his crew boarded the caravels, concluding the celebration in Jackson Park. A tugboat then towed the Santa Maria out of Jackson Park Harbor into Lake Michigan and north to the shoreline near Grant Park for the landfall reenactment; the Pinta and Niña remained behind. While the Santa Maria was well out into the lake, those aboard discovered a leak in her hull. Water began pouring in so fast that the ship listed. After being towed to shore, the reenactors persevered, claiming the land in the name of Her Majesty Queen Isabella. The day’s festivities included a mass at Holy Name Cathedral with Archbishop Quigley presiding, a parade, and a banquet at the Auditorium Hotel.

An unknown photographer documented the fires at the closed World’s Columbian Exposition fairgrounds on January 8, 1894, and the resulting ruins. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-17627

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Despite the destruction of the fairgrounds, the reproductions of Columbus’s ships remained safely moored in Jackson Park Harbor for decades. Above: The Pinta (left) and Santa Maria photographed for the Chicago Daily News, c. 1903. Chicago History Museum, DN-0000682 The Santa Maria (from right), Niña, and Pinta photographed around 1905. The structure in the background is the replica of La Rabida. During the World’s Columbian Exposition, the building housed Columbian relics; afterward, the city repurposed it as a fresh air sanitarium for sick children. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company collection, LC-D4-18840

Jackson Park Caravels | 33

Chicagoans enjoy the replicas of Columbus’s first fleet during a fine day at Jackson Park Harbor in 1910. Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News collection, DN-0008729

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A man stands on an ice floe holding onto a rope stretched between two of the caravels in 1911.

Winter maintenance, when performed, included protecting the hulls by breaking up the ice around them.

Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News collection, DN-0056498

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In the first decade of the twentieth century, various views of the Jackson Park caravels were issued as postcards. This one, depicting the ships bathed in the moonlight, was mailed in 1906.

Author’s collection

The replicas undoubtedly received the most attention around Columbus Day. Dressed in costume, members of the Knights of Columbus celebrate the holiday aboard a caravel in 1910. Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News collection, DN-0008680

Jackson Park Caravels | 37

For the Columbus Day reenactment in 1911, organizers arranged to have the Santa Maria towed out into Lake Michigan, at which time those aboard discovered a leak in her hull. Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News collection, DN-0057830

Passengers board the Santa Maria in Jackson Park Harbor as part of a reenactment of Columbus’s journey to the Americas, October 12, 1914. Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News collection, DN-0063549

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In August 1913, the Jackson Park caravels left Chicago with the intent of sailing to the PanamaPacific International Exposition, which would open in San Francisco in 1915. The ships were to be gone for five years, but all three had deteriorated to the extent that the Pinta and Niña nearly sank in Lake Michigan.

Those two ended their journey in Lake Erie; from there, they were towed back to Chicago.

An official guide book, published in 1914, provides details of the Santa Maria’s proposed journey to California and return to Chicago. The plan was for her to sail through the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean, followed by visits to Florida and the West Indies, including a stop at San Salvador, the site of Columbus’s first landfall. She was to sail next for Panama in time for the official opening of the Panama Canal on August 15, 1914. After passing through the canal, the Santa Maria was expected to arrive in San Francisco in time for the exposition.

Organizers planned the cruise as an educational venture where, on board the replica flagship, visitors could view many Columbian relics.

Boosters created this guidebook in preparation for the Santa Maria’s trip to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The pamphlet gave a history of the three replicas and their journey to Chicago, descriptions of artifacts on view aboard the Santa Maria, and details of the cruise to California. Cover: Author’s collection. Title page: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-68414.

The Santa Maria sailed through the Great Lakes as planned, into the Atlantic, and down to Boston where, because of financial problems, she remained. Boosters expected that many people who did not attend the 1893 exposition would take the opportunity to see her, an expectation that was never realized. On her return journey to Chicago, Canadian officials impounded the vessel for nonpayment of wharf fees and planned to sell her at public auction. Once the South Park Commission settled the account, the ship continued to Chicago, arriving under tow on the evening of July 23, 1918.

Crowds of dignitaries and others who were expected to welcome the Santa Maria home had left when, after waiting for eight hours, she had failed to arrive. An inspection made at the time showed that the ship had been poorly maintained during her time away and had not been painted. In September 1918, a feature story in

Although her intended destination was San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal, the Santa Maria only made it as far as Boston. A photographer captured her stop in Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 14, 1915.

Author’s collection

Jackson Park Caravels | 39

In Jackson Park Harbor, the Pinta began showing signs of neglect as early as 1903, as evidenced in this photograph of her partially submerged and listing. Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News collection, DN-0003409

the Chicago Daily Tribune challenged the South Park Commission to appropriate funds for the preservation and maintenance of the three caravels. The article also excoriated the commission for trying to send the ships to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, using them as a cheap sideshow, and causing the Santa Maria to be held for debt.

Except for occasional newspaper articles about the caravels and their condition, there are no maintenance or repair records on the ships. Between 1901 and 1918, the South Park Commission reported spending more than $55,000 on maintenance and the recovery and return of the Santa Maria, but this was not sufficient to keep them in good repair. Between 1903 and 1917, staff from the Chicago Daily News photographed the caravels in Jackson Park. Sometimes, even within the same year, the ships appear to be in a good state of repair and, at others, they seem almost awash.

In the spring of 1918, the Pinta’s seams opened. She This is the last known photograph of the replica of sank into the South Lagoon, and no attempt was made the Pinta, likely taken less than a year before she sank. to salvage her. During the night of February 7, 1919, She is in a dilapidated state: her mizzenmast is broken; the Niña burned to the waterline from an unexplained the yards and crow’s nest are missing as are parts of fire. She began to fill, and finally sank into the mud. the quarterdeck railing; and there are gaping holes in Eventually, dredges removed the remains of the Pinta the aft starboard. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, and Niña, because the debris proved threatening to National Photo Company collection, LC-F82-6720 pleasure boaters and the navigation of their vessels.

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1920–52

The sinking of the Pinta and Niña left only the Santa Maria, which in 1920 underwent a major rebuild at a cost of $90,000. The ship had so much rot that little of the original replica was incorporated into the restoration other than the keel and metal fittings. Nothing more was reported about the Santa Maria until 1938 when an article appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune commemorating the fortyfifth anniversary of her arrival at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The article also noted her general state of disrepair: the ship was rotting and needed paint, the decks were strewn with junk, the shrouds were in wretched condition, and the bilges were filled with foul-smelling water.

In 1940, public officials deemed it unsafe for visitors to board the Santa Maria. It was estimated that the cost of painting, caulking, and other repairs would be $30,000. The park district did not have the funds for this work but hoped for both donations of needed materials and assistance from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). At this time, the anchor and other items from the ship were donated to the Chicago Historical Society; the ship’s large and small cannon were thought to be the only pieces still on board.

Six years later, the members of the Jackson Park Yacht Club were weighing in against the Santa Maria, calling her an eyesore that took up space needed for their pleasure crafts.

The deteriorating ship remained, however, because many protested her removal, and she was still visited by schoolchildren and others. At the time of the Columbus Day holiday in 1947, the president of the park board declared the hulk an eyesore and “hopelessly beyond repair.”

In 1948, shipwrights and a naval architect boarded the Santa Maria in order to assess damages to the ship and estimate the costs of restoration. The vessel had settled into the mud bottom of the harbor and would require dredging to move her to an on-shore building for the rebuilding. The estimated cost was $300,000. The Knights of Columbus were eager to locate the necessary funds. The same year, as part of efforts to offset the project’s costs, a request for financial aid was forwarded to the Spanish government in Madrid. Finally, a plaintive note asking the city to restore the ship, one of the only remainders from the 1893 exposition, appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune on November 7, 1948, from a former member of the Jackson Park Yacht Club then living in Akron, Ohio.

The repair and reconstruction of the Santa Maria in the 1920s returned her to picture-perfect status, as evidenced by this postcard of Jackson Park Harbor, likely from the 1930s. Author’s collection

Jackson Park Caravels | 41

! THE ANCHOR OF THE SANTA MARIA "

I

n 1925, the South Park Commissioners tendered the anchor from Columbus’s flagship, originally brought to Chicago for display at the 1893 world’s fair, to the Chicago History Museum (CHM), where it was placed on display for decades. The accompanying text read, in part, “The place where the anchor was found, its fifteenth century construction and shape, references to it by a long line of historians, and local tradi-

tion are evidences of its authenticity.” The artifact remained in the Museum’s collection until 1992, when then director Ellsworth Brown and the board of trustees authorized its return to the Dominican Republic. CHM staff delivered the anchor into the care of the Fundación La Isabela, a nonprofit agency charged with collecting Columbian artifacts, in time for the nation’s 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus’s expedition.

The Santa Maria anchor, measuring eight feet and weighing three hundred pounds, on view in the Museum’s Gallery of Spanish Exploration in 1956. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-68779

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By 1951, it was obvious that nothing could be done for the Santa Maria. The ninety tons of ballast had caused the ship to sink a number of feet into the mud of the South Lagoon. Since workers had stopped cutting ice away from the hull, the ship had further deteriorated in the winter months, and according to the harbormaster, the keel had broken. A notice reading, “Danger Keep Off,” served as a warning to visitors. The hulk, now inhabited by animals, birds, and fish, continued to decay slowly.

Even if the ship’s advocates had secured funding for her restoration, doubts were raised about the availability of shipwrights and necessary The replicas of Columbus’s caravels photographed during their heyday materials. in Jackson Park, c. 1911. Author’s collection On April 3, 1952, a fire burned a section of the forward deck of the Santa Maria. A month later, the replica flagship of Columbus’s first landfall was destroyed, and her remains dredged out of the harbor. Where neglect on the part of the officer of the watch and the helmsman resulted in the loss of the original Santa Maria, neglecting to maintain her replica produced the same result.

Editor’s note: In May 2014, while working off of the coast Haiti, underwater explorer Barry Clifford revisited a shipwreck site that he now believes to be the remains of the original Santa Maria. With the help of Haitian officials, Clifford and his team will undertake a careful excavation of the site and analysis of the remaining material. Because of the find, Columbus’s first flagship may now have a new chapter to her story.

Joseph M. Di Cola, a native of Chicago, traces his interest in the 1893 caravels back to the visits he and his father made to Jackson Park when the Santa Maria was still moored there.

He currently lives in Troy, Ohio.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on this topic, see Joseph M. Di Cola and David Stone, Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair (Charleston, NC: Arcadia Publishing, 2012) and three older works, all available for paging in the Museum’s Research Center: Neil Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell, Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993); Andrew Kaul Jr., Official Guide, Historical Educational Cruise of the Santa Maria: Sailing in New Water (Reading, PA: Eagle Publishing Company, 1914); and José María Martínez-Hidalgo, Columbus’ Ships (Barre, MA: Barre Publishers, 1966).

Jackson Park Caravels | 43

White Sox World Travelers On the eve of the Great War, Charles Comiskey’s White Sox and John McGraw’s New York Giants introduced baseball diplomacy to a world on the brink.

RICHARD C. LINDBERG

W

ith the respect and admiration of the sporting world and a comfortable fortune to finance a bold adventure, Charles Albert Comiskey, baseball’s “Old Roman” and owner of the Chicago White Sox, decided the time was right to acquaint the rest of the world with America’s national pastime.

The idea of an off-season baseball goodwill tour pitting two teams in a series of exhibition games in the far-flung capitals of the world was not the Old Roman’s divine inspiration. In fact, he borrowed it from baseball pioneer Albert Goodwill Spalding, who led his National League White Stockings (forerunners of the modern-day Cubs) and an all-star team known as the All Americans on the first baseball world tour beginning in November 1888; although Spalding’s ulterior motive was linked to promoting his line of sporting goods equipment during stopovers in Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Egypt, Italy, France, and England. Likely with mixed feelings of envy and admiration for the venerated Spalding, Comiskey became determined to take a team of his own on a world tour on a grand scale. He had in mind a baseball expedition that would traverse five continents.

During the next twenty-five years, Comiskey’s ambitions did not wane. As a forerunner to the world tour, he tested baseball’s international waters by conducting the White Sox 1907 spring training in Mexico City. It was a baseball first, and the national press commented favorably. Then, beginning in early 1913, his plan began to crystallize once the pugnacious and competitive New York Giants manager John McGraw signaled his intent to partner with Comiskey, despite the understanding that the venture was unlikely to be financially profitable.

Indicating that he would personally finance the entire trip, if called upon to do so, Comiskey warned McGraw, “I’m prepared to spend $100,000 if necessary.” McGraw certainly had sufficient financial means. His outside business ventures included partnership in a Manhattan pool hall with fabled gambling boss Arnold Rothstein, known 44 | Chicago History | Summer 2014

Convention holds that “Old Roman” was a term of respect accorded to Charles Comiskey, above c. 1914, for his vision as a founder of the American League and his acumen in building Comiskey Park, likened to the Colosseum because of its stupendous size.

to his contemporaries as the “Big Bankroll” for his lavish betting habits and gangster associations. McGraw shrewdly recognized that this expedition was much more important than counting gate receipts: it was for the game, for the glory, and above all for the USA. Comiskey had appointed James J. “Nixey” Callahan, one of baseball’s most colorful figures, as Sox manager on October 22, 1911. A star outfielder of the 1890s, Callahan first joined the team in 1901, after jumping his

New York Giants manager John J. McGraw walks across Chicago’s West Side Grounds in 1906. Inset: James J. Callahan, Sox manager, c. 1914.

White Sox World Tour | 45

contract with the Chicago National League ball club in order to pitch for the White Sox in the new American League. After leaving the White Sox in 1904, Callahan became a big name in Chicago’s amateur baseball scene.

He operated the Logan Squares Baseball Club from 1906 to 1910, establishing the sandlotters as a popular and profitable attraction in the heyday of the independent teams representing nearly every neighborhood park in the Windy City.

Callahan was a hard-drinking dyed-in-the-wool Chicagoan, often chastised for his bad habits; but Comiskey had a genuine fondness for his former player, despite numerous run-ins and altercations over the years. The Old Roman recognized that Callahan had a good head for business and would be willing to carry out his mandates. On October 24, 1911, he commented to the Chicago Tribune: This thing of bidding goodbye to a manager is over and not seeing him again until the day until the team starts away on the spring trip belongs to other days. I want a man who can help arrange the spring trip, attend to the scheduling of exhibition games on that trip, look out for trades during the winter months as well as handle the team on the ball field.

I think Callahan is the man who can do it all and it’ll take a load of work off my shoulders. He’ll have a desk at the office and be where he can talk things over with me every day.

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Above: The interior of Comiskey Park, located at 324 West ThirtyFifth Street, photographed during construction on May 28, 1910.

Below: Fans line up outside the stadium in 1912.

Grace Reidy Comiskey (second from left) sits between her in-laws, c. 1913. They are likely at West Side Park for a Cubs–Sox City Series game.

Grace became the principal White Sox owner in 1939, following her husband’s death, and guided the team until her passing in December 1956.

Callahan’s first important assigned duty was to attend to diplomatic business associated with the impending world tour. He traveled to Washington to meet with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and President Woodrow Wilson and secure letters of introduction from the State Department to various United States ambassadors in farflung cities. The trip was a success. The government heartily endorsed the excursion as a means of promoting friendly relations among nations at a time when the world situation was becoming increasingly tense; the major powers of Europe had elevated military preparedness in a steady forward march toward global conflict. Senator J. Hamilton Lewis of Illinois, the Majority Whip, promised the Sox manager that he would arrange the introduction of a resolution on the Senate floor wishing the teams Godspeed, an action afforded Comiskey and McGraw official sanction at the highest level.

In what normally would have been the off-season and a time of rest, Callahan was thrust into the unfamiliar role of diplomat, travel planner, and team manager— tasks suited for three full-time employees. He had also inherited a White Sox ball club treading water and in the midst of a six-year struggle to build another championship-caliber team. The Hitless Wonder Era, culminating in a World Series championship over the Chicago Cubs in 1906, and the hope of repeating as champions

in the next two years ended ingloriously on the last day of the 1908 season. Thereafter the results on the field were lackluster for the Sox faithful as Comiskey turned his attention to other matters, namely the construction and grand opening of the new concrete and steel Comiskey Park, dubbed the “Baseball Palace of the World,” in 1910 and organizing plans for the world tour to come.

Callahan was a key member of Comiskey’s inner circle of travel planners, whose ranks included M. D. Bunnell of Chicago, director and advance agent for the tour, and Joseph Chesterfield Farrell, founder of the prestigious Woodland Bards, a White Sox fan group of civic elites (250 members strong), and future publicist for the Chicago Blackhawks. Throughout the long trip, Farrell filed his daily dispatches to the Chicago Tribune as their official correspondent. At Comiskey’s urging, Ted Sullivan, minor league magnate and the Old Roman’s mentor during his baseball apprenticeship in Iowa back in 1879, booked passage, too. John Louis Comiskey, the Old Roman’s only child, spent many long hours mapping out the trip logistics. For Lou, as he was known to friends and associates, the world tour was also his honeymoon. Shortly before the Pullman passenger cars departed Chicago, the young man married Grace Reidy, who came from a prominent Chicago family.

White Sox World Tour | 47

In advance of the tour, the Chautauqua Tours sent this letter, containing departure logistics and detailed packing guidelines, to White Sox pitcher Joe Benz.

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The contract agreements were drawn up and signed on May 9, 1913. Bunnell sailed for Europe the next day to attend to the hotel reservations, event scheduling, and arrangements incidental to the trip’s scheduled kickoff in October—in Cincinnati. In order to raise revenue to augment his personal investment, Comiskey decided that the Giants and White Sox would play a grueling schedule of thirty-two exhibition games in thirty-three days before paying crowds in American ballparks. In the meantime, the sixty-seven tourists in the party—including players’ wives, wealthy fans, and

Comiskey’s business associates—wound their way west to Seattle for their Pacific sailing the following month.

The tour, planned by Sullivan and Comiskey before McGraw’s consent to participate, included scheduled stopovers in Manila, Philippines; Japan, Hong Kong, and China; Colombo, Ceylon; Sydney and Melbourne, Australia; New Zealand; Cairo, Egypt; Rome, the Riviera, and Monte Carlo, Italy; Paris and Nice, France; Ireland; and London and Liverpool, England, before their scheduled return to the United States in late February 1914.

In this drawing, the artist cleverly turned the world into Comiskey and McGraw’s personal baseball diamond, noting tour stops from Europe (in right field) to Australia (as third base).

White Sox World Tour | 49

Above: Comiskey (left) consults with A. G. Spalding shortly before embarking on the world’s tour. Below: Comiskey was among the first to charter luxury trains for his players. Here, he stands with Callahan (right) and longtime Sox pitcher “Big Ed” Walsh (left) in advance of a spring training trip.

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“The best story about that tour was just before we left Chicago,” Lou said in an interview years later. “The boss [Charles Comiskey] received more free advice than anyone got. He was told that if he and McGraw persisted in their elaborate plans which already caused them to assume obligations of more than $100,000, they were due to lose a fortune. Well, my dad told one of them one day, ‘It is too bad I wasn’t told that before I gave the steamship company $90,000.’”

Spalding, truly one of the fathers of modern American baseball, met privately with Comiskey inside the latter’s offices in the Fisher Building on October 1, 1913, and furnished last-minute travel advice that proved invaluable in the months to come. Spalding had returned to Chicago from the West Coast following a long absence and was eager to share his ideas and counsel with the Sox owner. In appreciation, Comiskey escorted the elderly Spalding to his South Side stadium and treated him to a game and dinner in the park’s exclusive Bards Room, where friends, associates, and reporters enjoyed the Old Roman’s hospitality.

The ballplayers departed from Chicago’s Polk Street Station aboard a specially chartered train at 11:00 P.M. on October 17 to begin the first leg of the trip.

Unexpectedly large crowds turned up in whistle-stop towns from Cincinnati to Seattle to glimpse the famous big league ballplayers visiting their ballparks and rickety,

Ted Sullivan’s commemorative book, History of World’s Tour, includes group photographs of the Giants (above) at an unidentified stopover and the White Sox (below) in Cairo on February 3, 1914. The young boy at the center of the Chicago team is Jimmy Callahan’s son, Daniel.

White Sox World Tour | 51

The stars of the world’s tour included (from left) outfielder Tris Speaker, pitcher Christy Mathewson, and infielder Buck Weaver. Here, Speaker sits in front of the Comiskey Park grandstands in 1912; Mathewson stands on the field at West Side Grounds in 1905, a championship year for the Giants; and Weaver is pictured in 1917.

wooden grandstands. The Giants roster included a gallery of stars: the immortal Christy Mathewson, Olympian Jim Thorpe, and National League stalwarts Hans Lobert, Larry Doyle, Fred Merkle, Charles “Bunny” Hearn, Mickey Doolan, Lee Magee, Ivey Wingo, George “Hooks” Wiltse, Mike Donlin, and an unknown White Sox rookie recruit, Urban “Red” Faber. McGraw “borrowed” the knuckle-balling right-hander and future Hall of Famer from the Sox (with Comiskey’s blessing) to round out his team.

The White Sox were a mix of young, up-and-coming talent sprinkled with well-known players—Jim “Death Valley” Scott, star shortstop George “Buck” Weaver, rookie catcher Ray Schalk, Joe “Butcher Boy” Benz, and Tom Daly—plus a mix of American League stars and everyday players, including Red Sox great Tris Speaker; Browns pitcher Walter Leverenz; “Wahoo Sam” Crawford of the Tigers; Herman “Germany” Schaefer, one of Major League Baseball’s great comedians; as well as Dick Egan, Steve Evans, Jack Bliss, and Andy Slight, who never played Major League baseball but served as the Sox’s catcher on the tour.

Comiskey and McGraw had proffered invitations to many other American and National Leaguers, including second baseman Napoleon “Nap” Lajoie of the Cleveland Indians, a great infielder and legendary player of the Dead-ball Era of baseball. Fearing seasickness, Lajoie decided to decline: “Too damp a prospect,” he sighed.

There were others who shared these apprehensions and sent back their regrets. Roger Peckinpaugh, star shortstop of the New York Yankees, mistakenly believed he would have to put up a thousand dollars of his own money for travel expenses and therefore declined.

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Wives, fans, business associates, and wealthy tourists accompanied the teams and travel planners along with Norris “Tip” O’Neill, president of the Western League; James McAleer, former Red Sox manager; Comiskey biographer Gus Axelson of the Chicago Record-Herald; and two umpires, Bill Klem and John Sherman. Tris Speaker later joked, “The trip would have been a great success if we had only dropped the umpires overboard in the Atlantic Ocean!”

The exhausting Cincinnati-to-Seattle barnstorming tour preceding the sailing was not without drama. In Tulsa on October 27, 1913, a crush of five thousand fans jammed into the city’s tiny ballpark to witness a legendary pitching matchup: Christy Mathewson against Walter “The Big Train” Johnson. The latter, the great righthanded ace of the Washington Nationals, was enjoying his off-season in Lake City, Iowa, about a hundred miles from Tulsa; but he volunteered to pitch for the White Sox and waived his fee for the chance to square off with Mathewson. The two greatest pitchers in the game— future Hall of Famers both—squared off in a marquee billing! Johnson, whose fastball compared favorably to Sandy Koufax’s in the 1960s, pitched a 6–0 whitewash after Buck Weaver supplied most of the offense in a fivefor-five performance. The day was marred by tragedy, however, when the jam-packed right-field bleachers collapsed, injuring fifty and killing a soldier minutes before the first pitch was thrown. Incredibly, the game went on as planned despite the accident.

The world travelers finally set sail on November 19.

The Prince Rupert, a steamship chartered to convey the group from Seattle to Vancouver, pulled away amid a chorus of cheers from fans and press standing dockside.

Top: The world’s tourists wave good-bye from aboard the Prince Rupert as they set sail from Seattle. Photograph courtesy of John J. Gleason. Above: Uncle Sam gazes as the ship carries them away.

Cartoon by Briggs.

In Vancouver, the party boarded the SS Empress of Japan (center) bound for the Philippines. Left: Mr. and Mrs. Comiskey aboard the steamer. Photograph courtesy of the Chicago Record-Herald.

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In Canada, the party boarded the Empress of Japan and set off for the Philippines on the first leg of the journey.

At the card tables below deck, the Old Roman proved that he was equally adept playing the game of hearts as he was covering first base in his professional career and leading the White Sox to their 1906 World Series victory.

“Comiskey was a natural card player,” Axelson later wrote. “Besides having that unique gift of card sense, his marvelous memory stood him in good stead. Except in his younger days he never played poker or any other gambling game.” Cigar smoke hung low in the card room. Laughter, merriment, and the exchange of tall tales continued late into the night most evenings for those who did not succumb to seasickness. Violent storms in the Pacific added to the discomfort. Midway across, Joseph Farrell dispatched a ship-to-shore telegraph message that read: “All well except the passengers.”

After the rough and at times dangerous crossing, the group arrived in Manila on December 18 for a short twoday stay and a lavish reception hosted by the governor general and the commanding general of the United States Army. The ballplayers arrived in a land torn apart by two decades of war and revolution. The Moro Rebellion had ended six months prior, and the US Army During a stop in Japan, Frank T. Farrell photographed McGraw (right) standing with “the Most Prominent Japanese Baseball Rooter at Tokio [sic].”

Germany Schaefer, the great comedian of the world’s tour, pictured at Chicago’s South Side Park in 1905. At the time, he played for the Detroit Tigers.

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maintained a tense and uneasy peace. The arrival of the White Sox–Giants tour cheered the troops and stirred curiosity and interest among the Filipinos. Old animosities were temporarily set aside, and before the game, the Sox, Giants, and team members of the Manila baseball club as well as various soldiers, dignitaries, and diplomats marched around the athletic field in a show of patriotic fervor.

To the strains of “Yankee Doodle,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “The Swanee River,” the tourists and their Philippine hosts exchanged greetings and listened to speeches from Commanding General J. Franklin Bell and local leaders. The White Sox won the first official game of the tour by edging the Giants 2–1 through brilliant execution and exceptional play. Germany Schaefer’s stunts and comedic antics, including an exhibition of precision juggling, delighted the Filipino crowd.

The teams arrived in Japan on December 6, four days behind schedule. Conveyed through the streets of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki in rickshaws, the players and tourists purchased Japanese silks, jewelry, toys, and works of art. In Nagasaki, twenty-five vendors scaled the sides of the steamship and laid out their wares on the deck: Mandarin coats, tortoise shell jewelry, pillow covers, kimonos, and Chinese silks. Comiskey warned

The world’s tourists take in the sights of Egypt. Mr. and Mrs. Comiskey appear at the center of the group, seated on camels, the “ships of the desert.”

Sir Thomas Lipton (center) hosted the party during their stay in Colombo. He stands with Tip O’Neill, a close friend of and top adviser to Charles Comiskey.

his charges not to squander their money in tourist traps, but caught up in the excitement of their new surroundings, few listened. The Giants and White Sox appeared before some of the largest and most respectful crowds of the entire trip in Japan. In Tokyo, the Americans squared off against a team of Japanese students at Keio University. “The game was to start at Sunday morning at 10:00,” the Jiji Shimpō newspaper reported, “and at 9:00 the crowd at the grounds was so big the gates had to be shut and no-one admitted. The mixed Americans were too strong and beat the Keio boys 16–3.”

From Japan, it was on to Hong Kong where the restless travelers were given the keys to the city. Then they were off and sailing to the major cities of Australia, including Queensland, Brisbane, Sydney, Victoria, and Melbourne, where they played before a large throng of spectators and Lord Denham, the Australian governor general, in a professional cricket field in January. In Colombo, the party met up with Sir Thomas Johnstone Lipton, yachtsman, adventurer, and famed tea merchant from Glasgow who lent his name to the popular grocery store variety known today. Lipton hosted a special luncheon for the party. He presented each player with an autographed package of tea and remained to witness a five-inning affair played inside a local racetrack before five thousand curious spectators. Comiskey and Sir Thomas talked of cricket, baseball, and tea leaves, becoming close friends that afternoon.

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During the tour, Joseph C. Farrell kept his readers apprised of the tourists’ activities and adventures.

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Observing the crowds, Gus Axelson would later write: The players soon discovered that all the enthusiasm was not confined to the States. They encountered as much noise in Tokyo as they had under the lee of Coogan’s Bluff [the New York Polo Grounds] and the racket that greeted the tourists in Manila developed as much lung power as did the most approved concert on a busy day in the bleachers at Comiskey Park.

Axelson noted that Australian spectators were “cordial but not exuberant.” Cricket, after all, was still their national game.

The tour comprised more than seventy baseball games, including those played in the United States before departure. It was a frantic, hectic pace for everyone. Without a union to act on their behalf, the athletes played without pause with only stormy weather, testimonial dinners and receptions, and intercontinental travel affording them some much needed time off. Even more contests were scheduled, but there were rainouts in Rome and Paris and a monsoon in Shanghai, which allowed some time to sightsee and gape at the world’s antiquities.

In Egypt, Buck Weaver and his White Sox pals toured the interior of the Great Pyramid of Giza and donned fezzes for group photographs taken in front of the Sphinx. The players constructed a crude diamond in a thirty-by-forty-foot playing field in front of the ancient monument, as cameramen positioned their tripods and recorded the curious sight for posterity. Then it was on to Cairo and the Heliopolis grounds, an expanse of desert surrounded by palm trees and a botanical garden.

The first matchup in the desert ended in a 3–3 draw.

The next day the Giants beat the Sox 6–3 after pulling off a rare triple play. “We played at Cairo and there were plenty of fierce-looking Bedouins sitting around,” Lou Comiskey remembered. “I gotta a helluva thrill out of watching a game in the shadow of the Pyramids.” Among the gathering was Abbas Hilmi II, the khedive of Egypt (the ruling authority under the flag of the old Ottoman Empire), and his advisors were also drawn to the American game played in the scorching sands.

The Egyptian engagement concluded, the group sailed across the Mediterranean aboard the German steamer Prinz Heinrich for games scheduled in Naples, Rome, Nice, Paris, and London. In Naples, the Old Roman was presented with a bronze statue of the Discus Thrower as a token of Italian goodwill; the Comiskey name was attaining prominence worldwide. Then, it was on to Rome. After spending an hour inside the Forum near the spot where Mark Antony delivered his funeral oration, the frail and sickly Pope Pius X granted a private audience to Comiskey and his entourage and extended papal blessings to all. Tris Speaker, Jimmy Callahan, the Comiskeys, and John McGraw agreed it was the highlight of the trip.

Sox pitcher Joe Benz, pictured here at Comiskey Park in 1912, won the final game of the tour.

The Old Roman was sidelined by illness in Rome—the rigors of the demanding trip finally caught up with him—but he vowed to be shipshape by the time the climactic moment of the tour arrived, their appearance at Stamford Bridge in London before King George V on February 26, 1914. The famed soccer stadium opened in 1876 and remains to this day the home field of the Chelsea Football Club of the English Premier League.

The game was an exciting extra-inning affair resolved in favor of the White Sox when Tom Daly smashed a long home run in the eleventh inning. “We all met the King,” Lou Comiskey beamed. “He was a great character and a real fellow. He knew something about baseball. In fact his knowledge surprised us.” The losing pitcher was Red Faber, who was destined to spend his entire twenty-year career in Chicago as a member of the White Sox, beginning in the upcoming 1914 season. “No game was ever more hard-fought than the extra inning tempest at London,” Axelson wrote. “Few had been as sensational.

Seldom had the spectators been as numerous.” The crowd was pegged at thirty-five thousand—amazing given the soccer-mad Brits’ general unfamiliarity with the game.

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On the occasion of their homecoming, the tourists received leather-bound books containing celebratory essays, songs, and illustrations, such as this poem by H. P. Burchell of the New York Times and cartoon by Wallace Carlson for the Chicago Inter Ocean.

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The London affair, won by Joe Benz, the “Butcher Boy” from Batesville, Indiana, marked the final game of the tour. Tallying up the results of the overseas play, the White Sox ultimately earned the bragging rights, posting twenty-four wins against twenty losses. In addition to the forty-four White Sox–Giants contests, the athletes had played six additional games against local teams.

Bidding a fond farewell to Old World empires, Charles Comiskey waxed poetic to reporters as the elegant RMS Lusitania prepared to sail from Liverpool on February 27, bound for New York. “I have not been well on the trip but who can be sick any longer?” the Old Roman advised the correspondents. “This should cure me for good and all, and I am returning to Chicago in better health than I have been in a long time and with the conviction that the world tour which we have practically finished was the greatest ever undertaken and has been of great benefit to baseball and to the world at large.”

The White Sox and Giants steamed into New York Harbor on March 6, 1914. Comiskey and McGraw thwarted attempts by representatives of the newly formed Federal League to reach the athletes with lucrative offers to jump their contracts and join the rival third major league. Opposed to interlopers at all costs, Comiskey barred them from stepping onto the deck of the liner, ensuring that a controversy of this kind did not

Sidney Smith of the Chicago Daily Tribune celebrated the close of the tour with his cartoon Completing the Circuit—The Slide Home.

A Daily News photographer captured Mr. and Mrs. Comiskey, Jimmy Callahan (at right), and his son, Daniel, at the train station upon their triumphant return to Chicago.

dampen the festive mood and good feeling. The Federal League tempest swept away for the moment, testimonials and accolades soon awaited the conquering heroes.

They were feted with a grand banquet attended by eight hundred baseball enthusiasts and dignitaries at the Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan. The next morning, a train racing along the Lake Shore route shuttled the party home to Chicago.

Like modern-day rock stars on tour, Comiskey and the players were thronged by fans and well-wishers. Tickets for the ceremonial banquet at the Congress Hotel on March 11 sold out days in advance. Songs and speeches highlighted the affair. A rendition of “The Wearing of the Green” saluted Comiskey’s Irish heritage. During the signing of “Chicago,” all present arose with glasses held high in a toast to Comiskey, his players, and everyone else involved. Nearly a thousand guests shouted out in unison: “The White Sox! May they always win; but win or lose, the White Sox!” Soon after, Comiskey received the happy news that the trip was not the financial loss everyone expected it to be. The expedition had actually yielded a small profit on his $121,000 investment.

What did Charles Comiskey actually accomplish by all of this? The question has often been asked. For the White Sox, the 1913–14 world tour helped establish them as a national team, not just as a Chicago attraction.

With a string of successes in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Comiskey’s White Sox enjoyed preeminence in the local baseball wars with the Cubs. Until the 1919–20 Black Sox Scandal devastated the fortunes of the ball club and plunged the team into a thirty-year White Sox World Tour | 59

Above: Guests at the homecoming banquet at Chicago’s Congress Hotel on March 10, 1914. Below: Baseball greats Red Faber (left) and Babe Ruth shake hands at Comiskey Park in 1929.

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period of losing baseball and dwindling attendance, the South Side team was arguably the number one sports attraction in Chicago. Comiskey’s triumphant world tour likely contributed to his charter membership in baseball’s Hall of Fame; the hall would induct him posthumously in its first class of inductees in 1939.

Sadly, the many diplomatic successes of the journey were fleeting. Six months after the Sox and Giants arrived home, the world was plunged into a war that devastated nations and broke up the old order. Pope Pius X passed away in August 1914, just three weeks after war broke out on the continent. Abbas Hilmi II, khedive of Egypt, was deposed on November 5, 1914. The RMS Lusitania, launched by the Cunard Line in 1907, was sunk by a marauding German U-Boat on May 7, 1915, with heavy loss of life.

Comiskey never lost his youthful enthusiasm for baseball travel. On the tenth anniversary of the famous tour, the aging owner and John McGraw took their respective ball clubs on a scaled-down European junket to England, Scotland, France, Germany, and Belgium over the winter of 1923–24. They toured battlefields from the Great War. In boisterous Paris cafés, the White Sox were called the “Bash blanc.” All in all, it was a memorable trip, but it did not match the fan enthusiasm or worldwide interest generated by the original tour. Comiskey expressed a desire to organize a baseball tour to South American capitals, but the years caught up with the owner and his death in October 1931 ended that dream. In 1934–35, however, Babe Ruth and fourteen visiting ballplayers toured Japan and played twenty-two games in local ballparks. By then the Japanese were very familiar with the American game, and enthusiastic patrons supported many local college and amateur teams. A year after Ruth’s barnstorming tour, Japan launched its first professional baseball league.

Exotic ocean-going, globe-trotting tours like the one engineered by Comiskey and his faithful supporters may seem quaint compared to modern standards of transcontinental air travel and instant communications. In 2002, the Chinese Baseball League formed, and since 2005, the World Baseball Classic, played every four years, has significantly expanded baseball’s international boundaries.

In 2008, selected teams from the American and National Leagues began opening their respective seasons with games played in Japan. The world has changed, but baseball remains America’s pastime. Thanks to the White Sox, the Giants, and their 1913–14 world tour, its appeal endures on a global stage.

Chicago writer and historian Richard C. Lindberg is the author of sixteen published volumes, including Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family, My American Life and Total White Sox.

The White Sox and Giants met again in the 1917 World Series.

McGraw stands second from left. Umpire Bill Klem, who officiated during the 1913–14 world’s tour, is second from right.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 44 and 45 inset, details from i68354; 45, SDN-051449; 46, top: SDN-008842, bottom: SDN-057726; 47, DN-0056803; 48, i68365; 49, i68355; 50, top: i68346, bottom: i68348; 51, top: i68353, bottom: i68352; 52, left: detail of SDN-057974, center: SDN003759, right: i20697; 53, clockwise from top: i68357, i68349, i68359, and i68358; 54, top: i68360, bottom: SDN002980; 55, top: i68347, bottom: i68364; 56, clippings from the Chicago Daily Tribune, left: February 22, 1914, pg. B4, right: March 3, 1914, pg. 14; 57, SDN-057719; 58, top: i68362; bottom: i68361; 59, top: SDN-059165; bottom: i68363; 60, top: i68351; bottom: SDN-068994; 61, SDN061295.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The Museum holds “The Homecoming of Chas. A. Comiskey, John J. McGraw, James J. Callahan: March 6th, 1914,” a souvenir booklet compiled by R. W. Lardner and Edward G. Heeman containing essays, poems, songs, and photographs marking the occasion of the world’s tour, as well as Timothy Paul “Ted” Sullivan’s History of World’s Tour: Chicago White Sox, New York Giants (Chicago: M. A. Donahue, 1914). On Charles Comiskey, see Gustav Axelson, Commy: The Life Story of Charles Comiskey (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1919). On the White Sox, see Richard Lindberg’s Stealing First in a Two-Team Town: The White Sox from Comiskey to Reinsdorf (Champaign, IL: Sagamore Press, 1994) and Total White Sox, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2011). On early baseball history, see Harold Seymour’s Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960) and Baseball: The Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

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M A K I N G H I S T O RY I

Sporting Heroes: Interviews with Mike Krzyzewski and Jerry Reinsdorf T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

F

ew Chicagoans have transformed American sports as much as Mike Krzyzewski and Jerry Reinsdorf. Since 1980, when he was named the head men’s basketball coach at Duke University, Krzyzewski has won four National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships and led the United States national basketball team to gold medals in the 2010 world championships and the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics. His 957 victories after the 2013 season make him the winningest basketball coach in major college basketball history.

Reinsdorf is the chairman and owner of two of the city’s most beloved professional franchises: the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago White Sox. His teams have delivered a combined seven world championship titles to the city. During the 1990s, the Bulls captured six championships (1991–93, 1996–98) and were the most dominant professional team in the United States. Reinsdorf was also responsible for the construction of three major sports facilities: New Comiskey Park (1990), now U.S. Cellular Field; the United Center (1994); and the Sheri L. Berto Center (1992) in suburban Deerfield. In 2005, when the Chicago White Sox won the World Series, he became only the third owner in the history of North American sports to win championships in two different sports.

Reinsdorf was born on February 25, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents Max and Marion (Smith) Reinsdorf were the offspring of Polish Jewish immigrants. “My father was born in Brooklyn and raised in Brooklyn,” Reinsdorf remembers. “My mother was born in Elkhart, Indiana.” Reinsdorf recalls a happy but migratory childhood: “We moved every year almost, as my father made a little bit more money, they would move to a little nicer apartment,” he explains. For one year, the family moved to Los Angeles while his father worked a night job at MGM. “But he couldn’t stand being away from Brooklyn; Brooklyn was all he knew,” says Reinsdorf, “so in 1944, we moved back.”

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Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski (left), recipient of the 2013 Amos Alonzo Stagg Making History Award for Distinction in Sports, and Jerry Reinsdorf (above), recipient of the 2007 George Halas Making History Award for Distinction in Sports.

Krzyzewski grew up in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. Left: His childhood home at 2029 West Cortez Street. Photograph by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 2013.

Krzyzewski has similarly modest Polish origins. He was born on February 13, 1947, in Chicago; his parents William and Emily D. Krzyzewski were the children of Polish Catholic immigrants. His maternal grandfather Josef Pituch arrived at Ellis Island in 1908 and migrated to Keisterville in western Pennsylvania. Josef’s daughter Emily moved to Chicago as a teenager, met and married William Krzyzewski, and raised their two sons, William and Michael, on the second floor of a two-flat at 2039 West Cortez Street in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood west of downtown Chicago.

Krzyzewski recalls his idyllic, safe 1950s neighborhood. “I walked to school from the time I was five years old, to St. Helen [Elementary School], which was about three and a half blocks away.” According to Krzyzewski, “the city then was like a series of villages, so people were accustomed just to let their kids go to school by themselves.” At the Columbus Elementary School playground two blocks from home, “we could play baseball, football, basketball with no parental supervision.”

Krzyzewski and Reinsdorf each recognize their parents’ distinctive struggles.

Max Reinsdorf has been described as a sewing-machine peddler. But his son describes him as a jack-of-all-trades. “He did everything. He drove a cab. He drove an ice cream truck. He got involved with some guy where they would buy old sewing machines. He’d drive around upstate New York, buy old Making History | 63

The 2007 Making History Awards celebrated the historic achievements of (pictured from left) William A. Osborn, the Tribune Company accepted by Dennis Fitzsimmons, Dr. Margaret Burroughs, Jerry Reinsdorf, and Marshall Field V. Photograph by Dan Rest.

sewing machines that weren’t even electric, bring them back to Brooklyn, and they would electrify and then sell them.” His father also attended bankruptcy and Internal Revenue Service auctions to buy goods he could resell. “There’s a Yiddish word for it: a tumbler,” explains Reinsdorf. “He probably had more money in his pocket at any one time than he had in his bank account.”

Neither of Krzyzewski’s parents finished high school. William was an elevator operator, including twenty-five years in the Willoughby Tower in the Loop.

Emily worked as a nighttime cleaning woman at the Chicago Athletic Club.

“When I was growing up, my dad, when he worked, didn’t use the name Krzyzewski,” adds Krzyzewski. “If people had an accent [or] a funny last name, it was tough for them to get work, so my dad went by Kross.” Even when William Krzyzewski died in 1969, his military tombstone in St. Adalbert Cemetery was inscribed with “Kross.” After Krzyzewski’s mother died in 1996, he and his brother William corrected the name on their father’s tombstone.

High school and college were instrumental for both Krzyzewski and Reinsdorf. The latter began attending Brooklyn Technical High School, but “I realized right after I got there that it wasn’t for me because their emphasis was on architecture and engineering and drawing, and I had no skills in that,” Reinsdorf recounts. “After two weeks, I reluctantly transferred to Erasmus High School, where I had a fabulous four years. When it came time for college, Reinsdorf entered George Washington University in Washington, DC. “That was the seminal decision that made my life,” concludes Reinsdorf. “It made me a different person. All I cared about in high school was [to] get out of school, go home, listen to the Dodger game on the radio, and go play stickball with my friends. College got me into these various activities. It’s where I finally realized I could be somebody.”

In 1957, Reinsdorf planned on attending George Washington University Law School on a scholarship. A week before classes started, however, “The scholarship dean called me in and said you can’t be on the university’s payroll twice,” remembers Reinsdorf. “You’ve got a scholarship, and you’ve got a job in the auditorium. You’ve got to give up one or the other.” Reinsdorf insisted that was unfair. “The guy who had the auditorium job last year was on a football scholarship,” to which the dean replied, “Football’s different.”

Reinsdorf had applied and been accepted to the Northwestern University School of Law. “My mother-in-law [who lived in Chicago] called Northwestern and talked to the assistant dean,” remembers Reinsdorf. She negotiated half a scholarship for her son-in-law. “I was so angry with GW that I took it and left.”

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Within weeks, Reinsdorf had moved to Chicago and was living with his wife’s parents in Beverly at 99th Street and Campbell Avenue and commuting downtown. Today Reinsdorf is a life trustee of Northwestern.

While Reinsdorf was finishing law school, Krzyzewski was starting at Archbishop Weber High School in Chicago, a Catholic prep school for boys. At Weber, Krzyzewski came under the tutelage of two mentors: Fr. Francis Rog and Coach Al Ostrowski. He describes Rog as “a brilliant man and good guy, a mentor for a lot of kids. He explained things in a way which made me feel less guilty about just being The Museum proudly recognized the 2013 Making History Award recipients (pictured human.” Before attending Weber, clockwise from left): Mike Krzyzewski, John F. Sandner, United Airlines accepted by Krzyzewski had never played any orgaJeffery A. Smisek, John and Jeanne Rowe, and Bernarda “Bernie” Wong. Photograph by nized sports. Ostrowski not only Dan Rest. encouraged Krzyzewski, but “he believed in me more than I believed in me!” exclaims the Duke coach. “He saw something. He would make me do extra conditioning and assert myself. He told me, ’You can shoot the ball anytime you want. You’re the leader.’”

The influence of these two mentors was life-lasting for Krzyzewski. “I could not believe that two people had this impact on me. I wanted to have that impact on people. You can if you become a teacher or coach. So that was my goal, to be a high school teacher and coach, because I could not imagine anything greater than to have an impact on another human being.”

At Weber, Krzyzewski led Chicago’s Catholic Basketball League in scoring for two years, averaging between twenty-two and twenty-five points per game.

“I probably would have gone to Creighton or [the University of] Wisconsin.

Recruiting was not sophisticated at that time,” recalls Krzyzewski. Then Coach Bobby Knight of the United States Military Academy at West Point came to a game. “He was actually recruiting a guy from Loyola Academy,” remembers Krzyzewski. Instead, Knight convinced the teenage Krzyzewski to come to West Point where he captained the Army basketball team in his senior season (1968–69) and led the team to the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

West Point was challenging for Krzyzewski. “I came close to flunking French and electrical engineering,” he remembers. Worse yet, he failed physical education. “I didn’t know how to swim, and I never had done gymnastics. Freshman year I had swimming, gymnastics, boxing, and wrestling. I had to go three times a week early in the morning before class with a number of other guys in fatigues and boots and learn how to swim in survival swimming.”

That setback had a profound impact on Krzyzewski’s later coaching philosophy. West Point “put you in positions where you fail and then teaches you that failure is never a destination,” he summarizes. “You figure out how you will not fail, and you have to figure it out with someone else. So you either team up with that teacher, you team up with a classmate, but teamwork will get you to do things that you could not do alone.”

Reinsdorf had a plan when he entered Northwestern’s law school. “I had figured out in college that I was going to be a tax lawyer. As a part of the Making History | 65

Above: Chicago White Sox players wave farewell to fans at the close of the final game at old Comiskey Park, September 30, 1990. Left: The original Comiskey Park during demolition next to a walkway leading to the new Comiskey Park, June 1991. Photographs by Melody Miller.

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accounting curriculum, you had to take a tax accounting course, and people were struggling with this course. I got hundreds on my exams; there was nothing to it. My brain was oriented toward taxes.” Reinsdorf’s first job after law school was with the Office of Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, first at 17 North Dearborn Street, and then in the Pure Oil Building at 35 East Wacker Drive. “I got to watch Marina City being built by looking out my office window,” he recalls.

Reinsdorf was in collection litigation: dealing with individuals with outstanding tax liabilities. “The first day I walked in, they gave me a file and said, ‘Collect money from this guy.’ I looked at it—it [was] Bill Veeck.” The Chicago White Sox owner had been audited and a tax liability determined, but he was unable to pay. “It was my job to collect it or work something out,” remembers Reinsdorf. “So I worked out some kind of a payment plan with his lawyer.”

Reinsdorf remained at the IRS for four years before moving to the law firms of Chapman and Cutler in 1964 and Katten, Muchin, and Zavis in 1968.

Reinsdorf’s tax expertise led to his involvement in the emerging real estate syndication market. He organized a group of investors in 1971 and created one of the earliest public real estate limited partnerships, which in turn led to his own real estate syndication company, Balcor, in 1973. Almost a decade later, Reinsdorf sold Balcor for more than $100 million to Shearson Lehman Brothers. The sale of Balcor made Reinsdorf wealthy enough to join law school classmate Eddie Einhorn in buying the Chicago White Sox from Bill Veeck for $19 million in 1981 and a controlling interest in the Chicago Bulls in 1985.

Reinsdorf acknowledges that the purchase of the White Sox by a Brooklyn Dodgers fan was unusual. “If you lived in Brooklyn in the 1940s, your primary religion was the Dodgers,” he admits. “At the end of September 1957, the Dodgers announced they were moving. At that point, I said, forget baseball. I lost all interest. I was bitter.” But one day in the 1970s, when Reinsdorf and his family lived in Highland Park, his eight-year-old son Michael came home and declared: “I’m a White Sox fan.” Reinsdorf started taking his children to games at Comiskey Park. “My interest over the years in baseball started to come back.”

One day Reinsdorf thought, “Bill Veeck has owned the White Sox for five years. He has never owned anything for more than five years.” Reinsdorf asked his former law partner Al Muchin to approach a client who was one of Veeck’s minority investors and see if the White Sox owner was interested in selling the team. He was. “So I go down, meet with Veeck, and we end up shaking hands on a deal for $19 million.”

Reinsdorf began his thirty-third season as chairman of the White Sox in 2013, the longest ownership tenure in franchise history, ahead of club founder Charles Comiskey (1901–31) and currently the longest as a controlling owner among all Major League baseball clubs. Reinsdorf’s White Sox teams have captured American League division championships four times (1983, 1993, 2000, and 2005). The only Chicago teams with more division titles during those years are the Bears and the Bulls.

Upon graduating from West Point, Krzyzewski was required to complete five years of military service, although he kept playing basketball for a traveling all-Army team. After resigning from the service in 1974 with the rank of Captain, Krzyzewski lost no time in pursuing his dream to be a head coach.

He immediately joined the staff of his old Army coach, Bob Knight, at Indiana University as a graduate assistant. After one year with Indiana, Krzyzewski returned to his alma mater as head coach of the Army Cadets. Krzyzewski led West Point to a 73–59 record and one NIT berth in five seasons. Then on March 18, 1980, Krzyzewski was the surprise choice for the head coaching Making History | 67

position at Duke University. He was only thirty-three years old.

Krzyzewski remembers waiting in the Raleigh-Durham airport after his third and final interview at Duke. He received a message to return to campus where he was offered the job.

He immediately called his wife. “I said they offered me the job, and I accepted,” explains Krzyzewski.

She said, “Well, that’s great.” Then she queried, “How much are we going to get paid?”

Krzyzewski paused. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I never asked them.” He admits retrospectively, “It was the way you did things. There weren’t agents.”

Krzyzewski ultimately earned $40,000 in his first year at Duke. In 2004, the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA) offered the head coach position to Krzyzewski for a forty-million dollar salary and partial ownership of the team. He turned down the offer to remain at Duke.

Krzyzewski led Duke through several rebuilding seasons before he and the Blue Devils became a fixture on the postseason national basketball scene with thirty tournament berths in thirty-three years. From 1996 to 2013, Duke qualified for eighteen consecutive NCAA tournament invitations.

Krzyzewski’s eleven NCAA tournament Final Fours (the national semifinals), five consecutive Final Fours, and twelve wins in Final Four games is exceeded only by UCLA’s John Wooden (12, 9, and 21, respectively). Krzyzewski’s NCAA tournament record of 79–24 and .767 winning percentage are the best among active coaches. His Duke teams have won thirteen Atlantic Coast Conference championships and won four national championships.

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A graduate of and former head coach at West Point, Krzyzewsk returned to speak at his alma mater on April 27, 2010.

Photograph by Ahodges7.

Krzyzewski led the United States men’s basketball team to Olympic gold in 2008 and 2012 and plans to return for the 2016 games. Below: Team huddle with Coach K, USA vs. China, Beijing, 2008. Photograph

by Kris Krüg.

Reinsdorf (right) pictured with Michael Jordan in 1998. In June of that year, Jordan led the Bulls to their sixth overall and third consecutive NBA title. Photograph by Bill Smith.

While Krzyzewski rebuilt the Duke men’s basketball program, Reinsdorf expanded his imprint on Chicago. In 1985, he purchased the Chicago Bulls as part of a syndicate for $9.25 million. Reinsdorf quickly turned a mediocre, has-been team into an international phenomenon. The Bulls had drafted Michael Jordan only months before, and with general manager Jerry Krause and head coach Phil Jackson built the powerhouse team of the 1990s. From 1985–86 to 1997–98, the Bulls compiled a record of 712–354 for a .667 winning percentage. A team that attracted an average of only 6,365 fans per game in 1985 was filling the 17,339-seat Chicago Stadium nightly in 1987. From November 20, 1987, through Jordan’s 1999 retirement, the Bulls sold out every game, and enjoyed a season ticket waiting list of 8,000. By 2004, the Bulls were the NBA’s most profitable team, generating $49 million in operating income with an estimated valuation of $356 million.

“I’ve seen the size of the business grow,” comments Reinsdorf. “Bill Veeck’s last year, 1980, his gross income was $12 million; in 2006 we were around $200 million. My first payroll in 1981, the whole team was $3.5 million.

Now it’s more than $100 million.” Some believe that the White Sox would fetch a price of one billion dollars if sold today. At one point during the 1990s, Reinsdorf’s teams had the largest individual contracts in the histories of both the NBA (Michael Jordan) and Major League Baseball (Albert Belle).

“It’s still not big business compared to others,” adds Reinsdorf, “but the impact on the community is enormous.”

The community impact is illustrated by Reinsdorf’s role in the construction of two new sports facilities in Chicago: New Comiskey Park (1991), now U.S. Cellular Field, and the United Center (1994). Building New Comiskey Park “was something that we had to do,” insists Reinsdorf. “We needed to generate more revenue in the ball park, so we wanted to see if we could build suites.” But by the late 1980s engineers informed him that “the ballpark is at the end of its useful life.” Reinsdorf then approached his law school classmate Illinois Governor James Thompson, asked for and received Illinois state assistance to construct New Comiskey Park.

The United Center, by contrast, was “a whole different deal,” explains Reinsdorf. The Bulls were so successful with Michael Jordan that the franchise built the new arena with 214 suites. “We sold them all for minimum Making History | 69

five- and eight-year terms. We financed the whole building off those suites,” adding, “we were the first to build a building where the financing was the revenue stream of the building.”

In building his teams, Krzyzewski emphasizes consistency. “I look for three things in a kid: he has to be good enough, he has to be prepared enough to do well here, and he has to have good character. And they’re all equal,” he explains. That consistency extends beyond the college careers of his players.

“I try to maintain our culture by always hiring my own players as assistants.”

Furthermore, he adds, “we have a managerial team of ten to fourteen managers who are here for four years, and they’re of equal status with our players as far as I’m concerned. They help us run everything.”

Krzyzewski’s success extends beyond the basketball court. The Duke basketball team consistently enjoys one of the highest graduation rates among NCAA Division I universities. Krzyzewski’s emphasis on education, mentoring, and character has also produced a small coterie of basketball coaches and executives. At least ten of Krzyzewski’s players and assistant coaches have become head coaches at other schools, including Tommy Amaker at Harvard, Mike Brey at Notre Dame, Chris Collins at Northwestern, and Johnny Dawkins at Stanford. Former Duke stars Danny Ferry and Billy King are currently the general managers of the Atlanta Hawks and Brooklyn Nets, respectively.

Both Reinsdorf and Krzyzewski have been leaders in local charities. The Chicago White Sox Charities and the CharitaBulls have donated millions of dollars to causes in the Chicagoland area. During the 1990s, CharitaBulls donated $4.5 million to construct the 70 | Chicago History | Summer 2014

Carson Pirie Scott’s window display of August 1995 foreshadowed the success of the upcoming season, during which the Bulls notched the best overall record in NBA history, 87–13. Photograph by John McCarthy.

The Bulls stormed through the 1997 NBA playoffs, defeating the Utah Jazz in the finals, four games to two. Below: Reinsdorf (second from left) during the trophy presentation.

James Jordan Boys and Girls Club and Chicago Bulls Family Life Center (1996) two blocks from the United Center. The facility houses a computer center, art studio, science lab, gym, dance room, and classrooms erected in memory of Michael Jordan’s father. The Chicago Bulls/Chicago White Sox Training Academy (2001), the White Sox Training Centers, and the Chicago Bulls Basketball Schools have provided opportunities for thousands of Chicagoland youth to annually participate in sports.

In Durham, Krzyzewski was instrumental in creating the Emily K Center, named in honor of his mother and adjacent to his parish of Immaculate Conception. “We raised $7 million to build it, and you have to raise a couple million a year to keep it going,” Krzyzewski explains. “We service about 1,500 kids a month and 140 of them in kindergarten through college programs, and we’re going to double that next year.” The Center services academically focused students in out-of-school programming to help them succeed in school, continue on to college, and break the cycle of poverty in their families. “It’s crazy good,” enthuses Krzyzewski. “My mom would be shocked that her name is on a building for kids who never would have gone to college [otherwise].”

Krzyzewski and Reinsdorf acknowledge that Chicago was integral to their success. Chicagoans “don’t care who you are or where you came from,” believes Reinsdorf. “As long as you work hard and you’re honest, you’re going to get ahead here.”

Reinsdorf at a volunteer event to construct a new kid-inspired playground at the Salvation Army Ray & Joan Kroc Corps Community Center in August 2012.

Making History | 71

“I take Chicago with me everywhere I am because of all the things that I learned there,” proclaims Krzyzewski. “I learned family. I learned faith. I’ve learned education. I learned that I wanted to be who I am today. I’ve learned about friendship.

Those are all things that have never gone away. Chicago has been that foundation.”

And he acknowledges the serendipity of it all. “I was lucky. I was lucky Josef Pituch came from Kraków and didn’t stay in those coal mining areas. I was lucky my dad’s family somehow got to Chicago.

And it’s worked out pretty darn well.”

You don’t have to be a Duke fan to believe that.

Timothy Gilfoyle is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and author of A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) and Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 62, left: courtesy of Mike Krzyzewski, right: courtesy of Jerry Reinsdorf; 63, courtesy of the author; 64–65, event photography provided by the Museum’s Office of Institutional Advancement; 66, top: i35694, bottom: i68389; 68, images downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, top: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coach_K_speaking_at_West_Point,_27_Apr_2010.jpg, bottom: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Team_Huddle_With_Coach_K_(27527668 36).jpg; 69, courtesy of Jerry Reinsdorf; 70, top: i68388; 70 bottom and 71, courtesy of Jerry Reinsdorf; 72, courtesy of the author.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The best place to begin learning about Mike Krzyzewski is from his books: Leading with the Heart: Coach K’s Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life, with Donald T. Phillips (New York: Warner Books, 2000); and Beyond Basketball: Coach K’s Keywords for Success, with Jamie K. Spatola (New York: Warner Books, 2006). For an autobiographical account of the 2008 Olympic basketball experience, see Mike Krzyzewski, with Jamie K. Spatola, The Gold Standard: Building a World-Class Team (New York: Business Plus, 2009). An early biography is Gregg Doyel, Coach K: Building the Duke Dynasty (Lenexa, KS: Addax Publishing Group, 1999). An insightful article on the class dimensions of college basketball and Duke University is Will Blythe, “Hating Coach K,” Esquire, April 1, 2010, http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306COACHK_226. For other interviews, see Mike Krzyzewski, interview with the Academy of Achievement, “Duke of the Court,” May 22, 1997, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/krz0int-1 and Susan HinesBrigger, “Mike Krzyzewski: Life Beyond the Rim,” St. Anthony Messenger, March 2006, http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Mar2006/Feature2.asp. Jerry Reinsdorf awaits his biographer. The quickest way to introduce him is through the Chicago White Sox website: http://chicago.whitesox.mlb.com/cws/team/exe_bios/ reinsdorf_ jerry.html. See also Jared S. Hopkins and Melissa Harris, “The Chairman,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 2013; Melissa Isaacson, “Chairman of the Adored: Reinsdorf Basks in Another Title Run,” Chicago Tribune, October 18, 2005; “Jerry Reinsdorf: Best Owner in Sports?” Frank the Tank’s Slant, July 7, 2006, http://frankthetank.me/ 2006/07/07/jerry-reinsdorf-best-owner-in-sports/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Jerry_Reinsdorf.

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In 2006, Krzyzewski founded the Emily K Center, named in honor of his mother, to provide out-of-school programming for lowincome students in Durham, North Carolina. Photograph by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 2013.